Bed bugs in Danbury, Connecticut senior housing

According to The News-Times, Danbury Housing Authority is fighting bed bugs in Ives Manor, a 98-unit elderly housing complex on Main Street in Danbury, CT.

Carolyn Sistrunk, executive director of the Danbury Housing Authority, said Monday the complex had a problem with the bugs in 2007 and spent about $17,000 to get rid of them.

“They were here in the fall,” Alex Sixbey, one of the tenants at Ives Manor said Monday. “It took a lot of work — by the exterminators and by me — to get rid of them.”

But Sistrunk said the bedbugs returned. While last year’s outbreak was confined to Ives Manor’s fourth floor, they may have popped up elsewhere in the building.

“We’re going to treat the entire building,” she said.

It does not sound like the bed bugs were necessarily completely gone. While it’s possible they were and the building was reinfested, it is also possible that some units had bed bugs and the tenants were unaware and/or not reporting them.

Many times, visual inspections will turn up nothing, especially if there is a small infestation. In time, however, it would explain bed bugs springing back.

Carolyn Cutler, who has lived in city housing for about 20 years, moved to Ives Manor more than four years ago and lives on the fourth floor. Last fall, she said, the pests showed up in her apartment.

In recent weeks “I found one on my sheets,” she said. “I’m changing my sheets twice a day. I’ve never seen them before. I don’t want to put up with this.”

Sistrunk said Ives Manor hired Amtech, a local exterminating company that is getting increasing experience in fighting bedbugs, to do the work. The company has even purchased a beagle trained to sniff out bedbugs to help its staff find the vermin.

The initial contract for the work is about $9,000, Sistrunk said.

And with a sense of great foreboding, but no great sense of surprise, I present this PCO soundbite:

Richard Monastero, Amtech’s president, said Monday for the foreseeable future people should consider bedbugs an ongoing problem, not a one-time thing.

I think people need to understand that bed bugs, just like roaches, are not a “One time problem”.

You can rid your home of bed bugs. However, if ONE bed bug “hitches” a ride into your house, it can start all over again.

As we all know by now, clutter is probably the biggest promoter of an infestation. Many situations in pest control rely on homeowner or tenant co-operation. This could not be more true than with bed bugs. People pay money and expect a problem to be resolved. They need to understand that if they do not clean/organize/encase etc. they are throwing money down the drain.

I own a small pest control company. At this point, we’ve done thousands of bed bug jobs with a very high success rate. The few failures we had all have one thing in common. They did not co-operate. They didn’t do their part.